#hr7521

Please for the love of everything, SPREAD THIS VIDEO. I'm not one to get into these situations where I'm like 'spread this! reblog! reshare! show your friends!' for mental health reasons but this is very very important. Tag your friends and spread this video as much as you can, read the bill for yourself, TAKE ACTION. @in-a-mello-mood @scraptumblers @amfloofer Read the bill 'HR 7521' here:

A.W. Ohlheiser at Vox:

TikTok, like any place on the internet where a ton of people are watching and sharing and competing for attention, is best understood in terms of both/and. TikTok is both a vital platform for community building and plagued by dangerous misinformation. TikTok is both uniquely good at providing a means for non-influencers to reach a huge audience and a platform that has failed, again and again, to fairly and adequately moderate the content posted there. TikTok is both riddled with huge concerns about the privacy of the data it collects on its users and, just like any other major social media platform, intent on collecting that data as part of its business model. On Wednesday morning, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to pass a bill that could eventually lead to a US ban of the app. Before we get there, some big ifs are in play: if the Senate also passes the legislation, if President Joe Biden follows through on his intention to sign it should the bill arrive on his desk, and if TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t successfully sell TikTok to a non-Chinese owner before the legislation’s specified deadline.

Still, the threat of a ban was real enough to prompt TikTok to take action. In a push notification sent to users last week, TikTok urged its users to “speak up now — before your government strips 170 million Americans of their constitutional right to free expression.” As a result, some House offices were inundated with calls, and some lawmakers who supported the bill accused TikTok of using the app to start a “propaganda campaign.” That language resonates with Republican calls late last year to ban TikTok, citing a viral but unfounded accusation that TikTok’s Chinese owners were “brainwashing” America’s youth with anti-Israel content by forcing it to get views thanks to the platform’s powerful recommendation algorithms.

The gray area of TikTok

One of the challenges of writing about social media is that both/and isn’t nearly as catchy as framing, say, TikTok as wholly good or wholly evil. TikTok’s counter-campaign to lawmakers’ push to frame the app as a data-guzzling Chinese propaganda tool is to point to the creators who make a living on the platform sharing educational, humorous, and otherwise wholesome content. Many of those creators are themselves speaking out about how the platform changed their life or helped them find a voice or earned them money.

Here are a couple both/ands about the bill to ban TikTok: It is both a bill that would potentially upend the livelihoods of people who use the platform as an income source and a bill that would not adequately protect user data across social media. It is both a bill that could have serious consequences for online expression and a bill that seems to be created by people with little understanding of what TikTok actually does.

Banning TikTok is a massive mistake that does NOTHING to solve privacy issues.

On top of that, it would further hurt the standing of Democrats among youth folks already angered over President Biden's handling of Gaza. #KeepTikTok #NoTikTokBan

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